


In Another Life

by Chinesepapercut



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Past Relationship(s), Santos Campaign, Unhappy Ending, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:22:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25245331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chinesepapercut/pseuds/Chinesepapercut
Summary: Events on the Santos campaign trail cause Donna to revisit a painful experience from her past. J/D AU set in mid-season 7.
Relationships: Josh Lyman/Donna Moss
Kudos: 32





	1. The Intern

**Author's Note:**

> KCat1971 this doesn't really have a happy ending, but it's not terrible either, don't kill me.

**Santos campaign. Second floor conference room. Some generic hotel. Some generic city.**

* * *

  
  


We picked the darkened conference room specifically because we thought it was empty. A place where a distraught intern could safely shed some tears and pull herself together enough to make it back to her room. 

I am not even sure I know her name. Allie? Ellie? I just know she’s an intern, who is probably in her very early twenties, not unlike I was when I joined the Bartlet campaign. But the similarities pretty much stop there. She is short and brunette, a poli sci major with a bachelor’s degree and a scholarship to a top law school. Where as I will forever remain the leggy blonde college drop out. The one the Bartlet campaign picked up like a stray cat. 

I am rooting through my purse for tissues while Cindy pats her back encouraging her to take deep breaths. We don’t notice that Josh is sitting in the corner. He’s probably trying to get some peace to review and mark up new copies of the stump speech Otto recently tweaked.

By the time I find my tissues, the intern is sobbing on Cindy’s shoulder, her story coming out in hiccups. Boyfriend from law school, late period, positive pregnancy test, yelling, tears, uncertainty over the future. Really it’s the classic story.

“Ah,” Josh clears his throat, “I don’t guess my input is welcome here,” he says as he stands and moves toward the door. But then, curiously he stops. “Listen,” he says, his voice is low and gentle. This is the voice that reminds me just how good Josh is at working through a crisis. “This is really none of my business, but it sounds like this is big, life-altering news you have just given someone. He probably reacted out of shock. Give him a little time to come around before you write him off completely. You might find that he has a change of heart in a week or two when he has had time to process the news. Otherwise you may both have lifetime regrets.”

He doesn’t look at me, or any of us when he says this. Instead his eyes are trained somewhere near my left shoe and in that instant I realize that this isn’t just advice. This is also an apology.

Wisdom provided, he walks quickly to the door, casts one glance back at us, fleetingly catches my eye and leaves, shutting the door softly.

I feel tears begin to prick at my eyes but I furiously blink them away before anyone will notice. Much like his admission that he missed me at the end of my first job interview for the Santos campaign, I can’t decide how I feel about what he just said. Was his sincerity real or was he, as in all things in his professional life, trying to manipulate the situation. Frankly, where did his professional life end and his private life start anyway?

Allie or Ellie -- damn it, why can’t I remember her name -- calms down enough to drink a little water from the cooler in the conference room.

Under some misguided notion that she owes us, she starts to tell us a little bit more about her situation. I wave her off with an assurance that it’s really something we shouldn’t be ashamed of in this day in age since it could happen to anyone. Well, probably not Cindy, unless she’s not exclusively into women, which I think she is.

Reassured that the intern is now in a state to make it back to her room without drawing undue attention, I make note to, per her wishes, have her transferred back to her hometown so she can see her doctor and start making the appropriate plans, whatever they are.

Before I go, I do something I desperately wish someone had done for me. I offer her my phone number and tell her to call me once she’s made her decision. I reason she’ll need to talk and I’m as good a person as any. I don’t explain that I’ve been through it before, at least this part of it, or that I’ve had now a year and a half of very expensive therapy in part because of that, but mostly other reasons. This isn’t about me anymore anyway. At least not at this moment it isn’t.


	2. A Look Backward

**Santos campaign. Seventh floor guest room. A new generic hotel. A new generic city.**

* * *

Even my knock sounds mad, so he must know it’s me well before he opens the door to his hotel room. It’s late, nearly midnight, and we’re in a new hotel in a new city. He’s already removed his suit jacket and tie and rolled up his sleeves. His laptop is open and powered up on the desk, C-span is on the muted tv. His luggage is stacked unopened by the closet and papers litter the desk by the bed. It’s probably the first time he’s been alone all day. I should know, I’ve been stalking him.

“You’re an asshole. A completely unmitigated asshole,” I snarl as I barge past him into his room. I turn around to look at him with anger in my eyes. I’m breathing heavy with the effort.

“Hi Josh, how are you tonight? Not so good Donna, thanks for asking.” He parrots my voice as he mimics a more polite greeting.

All I can do is glare at him so he lets go of the door and crosses his arms over his chest in a defensive manner. We both watch the door to his room swing shut before we continue. As pissed off as I am at him it’s not my intent to air any of our dirty laundry to other campaign staffers.

“This is what I get for trying to apologize?” He’s got the edge in his voice that lets me know he’s past being sarcastic and he’s actually really mad at me. Too bad for him I’m just as mad.

“Josh, even if what you said was the right thing to say and really did come from the heart, why say it in a room with other people? Why say it in a place where you knew I couldn’t even respond? The way you approached whatever the hell that was was just really inconsiderate.” My tone has softened but still clearly reflects my exasperation at him.

“You know I was going out on a real limb there with that,” he snaps. He’s still annoyed, which makes me annoyed again.

“Oh, you were, were you? Well I guess I have no idea what it feels like to be left out on a limb with no one to help?”

“I want to remind you that you left me. You LEFT ME. Whatever happened with that, it was your decision and you left ME.”

“It was my decision?” I respond immediately. “Jesus Christ, you don’t even know who I am, do you?” My words come out like a dark accusation. 

“Donna, we essentially lived together. I’m pretty sure I know you.”

“Josh, you know what you wanted to know about me. The parts you wanted to know.”

“Ok, try, me, what don’t I know about you.”

“It’s not about what you know or don’t know in terms of facts. You can collect a million things you remember about what I did or didn’t do but that doesn’t mean it’s who I was or who I am today. It’s the narrative you tell yourself that’s the problem. It’s all wrapped up in this belief you seem to still have that you saved me from a bad relationship and turned a country bumpkin into a cultured person. I’m nothing without you Josh Lyman. I owe everything to you.” I say, not without some sarcasm in my voice.

“Oh please, you were a child when I first met you.”

“A child you wanted to sleep with.”

“That’s gross, don’t paint our relationship in that light. Seriously, tell me something about you that I don’t know. I think you remember our relationship as being one sided, but I paid attention.”

“Ok fine, you know that I grew up near a farm and that I’d lived in a condo, but you don’t know that my dad was a barber and my mom sold Mary Kay.”

“Well that’s not fair. I know plenty about your parents, they had cats, two of them. I’ve met your mother. Your mother didn’t like me. But you know, I didn’t mean for you to get blown up.”

My bluster deflates when he brings up Gaza. I can still hear the guilt he carries about what happened flag in his voice. I sit on his bed and sag a little bit. 

“She didn’t think you sent me to Gaza to have me blown up,” I say softly, then look away. “My mother didn’t like you because she felt you were taking advantage of me. She didn’t like you because although I always assured her that our relationship was consensual she saw that it was incredibly problematic that it was even a place where there was a question of consent.”

“Ok that’s a lot of conjecture on her part.”

“She felt like our relationship was, well that there was an abuse of authority and position to even get to that place of consent. For a long time I didn’t agree with her, but over time I’ve come to see how she could feel that that there was abuse that took place in our relationship to protect your position even though no one ever directly outed us.” I don’t mention the very expensive therapy bills that went along with this re-examination of our shared history.

“I think that opinion doesn’t paint a very well-developed picture of your character,” he says simply.

“She didn’t like you because you didn’t love me, Josh. Sometimes I think she was right about that.”

“Jesus, Donna, I did love you and I’m sorry if you think I didn’t, but I feel like that’s unfair and possibly revisionist history.” He’s pacing now. Running his hand through his hair like he does when he’s agitated. “I did love you, dammit. Just because I wasn’t willing to sink my career to love you publicly doesn’t mean I loved you any less.”

“You loved me in the way someone loves an all-night convenience store. On your own terms, when it was easy for you and the moment it got the least bit difficult you weren’t interested. The sex wasn’t even worth the consequences. I deserved more.”

“I thought you understood this, this, our relationship, what it could be and what it could never be. That you enjoyed the sex. I was never trying to take advantage of you.”

“I know that. And yes, the sex was nice Josh, but you know, at a certain point I needed more. I was suffering and you never saw past the things that Josh Lyman wanted and didn’t get to try to help me. It was time.”

I look up at him and make eye contact. I can see that he has tears in his eyes before he looks away quickly. The silence in the room is deafening and the air is heavy.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t have the baby. I would have made a shitty father,” he finally whispers as he sinks onto the bed next to me.

I slowly let all the air out of my lungs as I let his words wash over me and bring me back to that place I’ve been trying not to go.

Things between us had been fraught for some time. Cliff, the MS Scandal, Amy, C.J.’s advice, Colin, Josh’s professional defeats, my unresolved and at that time unacknowledged PTSD. All had been little cracks in the dam that had been our on again off again relationship. A relationship that, it’s clear to me now, never would have survived an unintended pregnancy.

We had only slept together a couple times after I got home from Germany. Between the cast and PT, the idea of sex just sounded painful and well, it kind of was. Admittedly birth control didn’t even cross my mind. Years of sleeping together without a condom while I was on the Pill made it like muscle memory even though I will never be able to be on the Pill again due to my very scary experience with a pulmonary blood clot. I didn’t even realize I had missed my period. My body was still so broken from being blown up, that you can imagine tracking my cycle didn’t even register. It wasn’t until I started having other unmistakable symptoms that I thought to buy a pregnancy test. 

“You really think you couldn’t be a good father?” I ask, genuinely curious.

“I don’t know, maybe. At that time I didn’t think so. At first I was pretty upset you know. I said some things…It just wasn’t something I even wanted to be dealing with and I didn’t handle it well. But after I calmed down,” he continues, “I meant what I said earlier today. It took a few weeks but I started to change my mind on the idea. I, I didn’t know you felt like you did about our relationship, like you just told me you did at least. I thought for about a half a second that maybe we could make it work. And then, then you were gone.”

At this point I’m crying too hard to respond. Although therapy has helped me move past this broken part of my history it hasn’t made it any less raw when I have to relive it.

"I never hated you so much as I hated you then.” I finally choke out between silent sobs.

Apoplectic doesn’t begin to cover Josh’s reaction to learning about the pregnancy. Between being passed over for C.J. to replace Leo and several other more minor blunders, Josh had already been on edge. I probably would have done better if I had timed the news better, but like the intern, I too was grappling with the information so I ripped off that band aid as soon as I could, which meant at 7:30 am on a Tuesday morning just before he was about to run out the door to make it to Senior Staff.

I honestly have blocked out most of what he said. Simply erased it from my memory, because it was so hurtful. I recall him insinuating he may not be the father before he made a snide comment about my ‘IRA lover boy.’ Which I recall thinking was absolutely ridiculous at the time because how could I have remained pregnant after being blown up? I also recall Josh saying lots of things about how it was just a terrible, terrible time for ‘this’ and also freaking out about C.J.’s reaction to the news. Looking back, C.J. must have known we’d been sleeping together. It was an open secret in the press corps that we had even lived together for a time, so why he picked that as a major concern over say, my health and feelings on the matter, well for that I will never know. 

He never expressly asked me to terminate, but his reaction certainly made it clear he considered it the only reasonable outcome. At least that’s what I had assumed until today.

Now, that I’ve moved past the acute distress of the situation, I often wonder if I will ever get another chance at motherhood, it certainly doesn’t seem likely at this point in my life. Perhaps Josh is wondering the same about his chance for fatherhood.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, his own voice now watery with tears, “I hate that I put you in a position where you had to make that decision and go through it alone. I regret it now, I think I will always regret it. At the very least I should have been there to hold your hand or something.”

Now that I can tell he really is contrite; I feel my anger at him recede. He sees the change in my body and he reaches out to me and pulls me into his arms. Exhausted and craving human touch I let him hold me as I try to get my tears under control.

Once I can temporarily suspend the characterization I had made of Josh as the villain in this chapter of my story, I am struck by the realization that I am sitting now with the only other person in the world as profoundly affected by what happened as I am. In fact, the only other person who even knows what happened, sort of. And now I’m struggling with how much of the story I have for so long considered my own and my own alone that I’m obliged to share with him.

“Would you have wanted to….to try to work it out, if I had been more supportive?” Josh releases me and leans back a little, but continues to hold my hand.

“I don’t know,” I pause, sniffling, “maybe.”

“Pretty hard to be a good dad when you’ve apparently pressured the mom into a relationship and loved her in the way one loves a convenience store.” He sounds sad, almost emotionless as he says this.

“Oh God, Josh, I was mad when I said that. It wasn’t all as bad as that. At least not in the beginning. The end, well that was pretty bad.”

I look down at where our hands are joined and watch as he fidgets with my hand.

“I know this isn’t the right thing to say, but I, ah, I hated you a little too… at the end,” Josh says softly. “Not as much as I hated myself of course. At first I hated you for putting me in that position, which I know is ridiculous, but that’s how I felt. Then as I started to think through it more, I started to hate you for taking the chance away from me. It felt like a carrot dangled in my face. A future I could have had, snatched away. Intellectually I know that things wouldn’t have worked the way I imagined, and but I couldn’t help but think that if you’d given me a little more time to work through my initial shock that we could have worked through it.”

I take a shaky breath. “I wanted the baby,” I breathe quietly.

How do you abort a child that is half of someone you’ve loved and worshiped for years even if you’re not actively in love with them at the time? Even if they’ve treated you so badly that you question that they ever really cared for you in a fifth of the way you cared for them? Even if you are so mad and sad and frustrated you can’t see straight?

Yeah, I don’t know either. It wasn’t a decision I had to make. By the time I got into my doctor’s office, the ultrasound technician could see the fetus, but there was no heartbeat. The image of that lifeless shadow in my womb is forever burned into my mind. How could I so badly want something I didn’t want?

I started bleeding three days later. And, as most women do, I suffered in silence. My family doesn’t even know I had a miscarriage. Neither do any of my friends. And yes, it was painful and awful, but at least I’m comforted by not regretting any decision I did or didn’t make. My body made the decision for me before I could even think it through.

For his part, Josh never asked what happened. Clearly he knows I never had the baby. I tried to tell him about the miscarriage, but he wasn’t ready to talk so he avoided me. It’s part of the reason I ended up with a new job. 

It would be easy to say that at the time it felt like a bullet dodged -- I certainly felt lighter once the physical pain was gone -- but these things are never so simple. It was an experience that lives in my memory, now fraught with ambivalence. After the initial relief wore off, losing the pregnancy only served to underline how broken I was as a woman. Perhaps Gaza had robbed my ability to carry a baby to term. I still wonder about that even though my doctor said that it probably wasn’t anything to do with what happened in Gaza.

“I couldn’t do it…you know, couldn’t do that.”

Josh looks confused with a mixture of shock, hope, horror and surprise as if he’s expecting me to admit I had successfully concealed the pregnancy and I’m going to tell him he’s got a son or daughter just walking around out there.

“You couldn’t…what?”

“I couldn’t terminate the pregnancy.”

“You didn’t? You didn’t have an abortion?”

“Oh my god, I couldn’t do that. I was freaked out and upset at you but I wanted the baby. I loved you, Josh. I loved you with a heartbreaking passion. No matter how much I hated you in that moment I couldn’t get rid of something that was half of you.”

Josh looks as if my words have both redeemed me and stung him, but I go on anyway. “I tried to tell you, but you avoided me. I ended up miscarrying. There was no reason for it, it’s just something that happens sometimes.”

I notice a change in Josh’s energy as this information sinks in. I think it may also bring him comfort to know he ultimately didn’t have any influence over whether I had the baby or not.

“You would have had the baby?” he says with a soft reverence in his voice. As he says it he draws his fingertips along my jawline and tilts my head up until my eyes meet his. I nod and hold his gaze. “I spent a lot of time wanting your baby, Josh. It didn’t happen how I hoped it would, but I wasn’t going to change my mind on that.”

“How old would…um…it, ah, the baby be if…” his words stumble out.

“I, uh, I don’t know. About a year old, I guess. I try not to think about it,” I say around the lump re-emerging in my throat. “For some reason I always pictured the baby as a boy with my blond hair but your curls and dimples.” I’m unsuccessful at stopping the tears as they start to fall again as I reimagine the face I’d seen in my dreams, as I allow myself to think back to how I saw myself then, in another life.

He pulls me back into his arms and holds me as I cry fresh tears, this time the cleansing kind. I still have a lot of emotional work to do to move past this, but I feel like what happened tonight was an important step in moving forward.


	3. Morning Light

**The next morning.**

* * *

I’m started awake by the hotel phone. It’s still dark in the room, but the hotel clock reads 5:30 am, so it must be the wake up call. I’m accustomed to hotels now with their different layouts so I reach for the phone on the table next to the bed.

“Good Morning, this is your wake up call Mr. Lyman,” the receptionist says before I even say hello. I return the phone to its cradle without saying anything and start to settle back into the bed when I’m startled into consciousness. I look down and realize I’m still wearing my clothes from last night and I’m on top of the covers. Even more alarming, I’m not in the bed alone. Josh’s arm is slung over my waist in a position reminiscent of the many, many nights we’ve slept together. Fortunately, from what I can see in the dim light, he’s still mostly clothed too, in boxer shorts and an undershirt.

I don’t remember much about falling asleep last night. I must have been so emotionally spent I fell asleep shortly after crying in Josh’s arms.

“That was the wake up call. It’s time to get up,” I say as I jostle his arm lightly.

“Five more minutes,” he murmurs as he draws me in closer and settles his cheek on my stomach. My shirt has ridden up in my sleep and exposed the skin of my stomach to his face I can feel the stubble that’s grown there overnight. A strange feeling of contentment mixed with familiarity settles over me. It’s not uncommon for me to have this feeling with Josh. We’ve been on again off again for years and much as I’d like to say that I convinced myself I hated his breathing guts there for a while, I also really missed him. Specifically, I missed this, lying in bed with him in the quiet of the morning. The uncomplicated part of our relationship where we could just be together without worrying about the impact to his job, our coworkers, the competing things vying for our attention and our political opponents. Where we could, just for a moment forget how we’d been affected by bullets and bombs. It’s times like this in the quiet that I remember that I do still love him. I probably always will. But then the noise of the day rushes in and the quiet voice that optimistically tells me that he might just love me as much as I love him gets drown out by all the other priorities in our lives. He’s right, we would have made shitty parents. But something in me, the part of me that feels comforted by waking up in bed with him, still holds on to hope that it could be our future. That we could move past all the noise and complications and competing interests and stake our claim on a future where our relationship has its own room to grow before it gets choked out by all the metaphorical thorns.

“I missed this,” I hear myself saying as I unconsciously rub his back with my free hand.

“Me too,” he says into my stomach and sighs. I see his eyes drift closed again as my fingertips drift over his back.

After a few minutes he shifts and pushes himself up. And, in a move that I’m not entirely sure he’s conscious he makes, he leans over and kisses me good morning. The kiss is imitate and chaste at the same time, but he doesn’t linger. Instead he immediately pushes out of bed and moves to the bathroom where I hear him relieving himself, with the door open no less.

I sit up in the bed and turn on the bedside light which casts a garish orange glow on the room.

“Josh? What’s happening right now?” I call out to him from the bed.

“Well, I thought that was obvious,” he says as he finishes peeing and reappears in the bathroom doorway.

I roll my eyes at him. The vulnerable Josh of last night is gone again. Now all I see is Josh Lyman, political operative. As sexy as I once found that side of Josh, it’s not the side of him that made me fall in love with him.

He ducks back into the bathroom to wash his hands and brush his teeth. “I don’t know, what do you want to happen?” he calls out over the running water.

“Political mastermind Josh Lyman doesn’t have a plan?” I snark.

I want to tell him I don’t know. I want to say part of me really liked waking up next to you this morning. But part of me really still hates you. But maybe now a little less since we’ve actually gotten to talk about what happened. I want to tell him this, but the words don’t fully form and even if they did, it still feels really vulnerable to be having this conversation with someone I had cast as a villain in my life until yesterday.

Certainly Josh’s initial reaction to our pregnancy and his later silence are fairly inexcusable. But now that I know more about his subsequent thought process I’m recasting my own actions. If I hadn’t miscarried and indeed had had to make a choice about the pregnancy, would I have waited until Josh had calmed down and re-approached the decision with him? Would that have influenced our relationship in some way that I hadn’t thought possible. Then again it’s not like I was completely unreachable after I left, but I also ran away. I made it difficult at best for him to reach me. The message that I didn’t want him to contact me was pretty loud and clear. At the time I did need the space and distance from him to heal so in a round about way he possibly was giving me what I needed.

It’s just really difficult for me to reconcile that the person who held me as I cried last night is the same person who seethed in my face that instead of bothering him with my mistakes I should call my IRA lover boy and tell him I’m pregnant with his baby.

Josh returns to the room with his toothbrush in his cheek and looks at me

“Of course I have a plan. A nine-point plan actually. I was just thinking that wasn’t the plan you were looking for,” he smirks then ducks back into the bathroom to rinse his mouth. 

“You think you’re funny.”

“Yes, I’m very funny, remember my Panama joke that Kate Harper cut? Very funny I tell you,” he says as he begins rooting through his suitcase.

I give him a tight smile and lean over to pick up my shoes which had been discarded near the foot of the bed at some point last night. This isn’t resolved but I need to get going before the rest of the campaign is milling about in the hallways and assumes I’m doing the walk of shame.

“Honestly, Josh, I think the real decision is yours.”

“Oh come on, Donna, you know I’m the idiot when it comes to relationships. I even suck at friendships.”

“Honestly, I’m done doing the emotional labor of trying to explain to you, but I will try one last time because for some stupid reason I still care about you.”

He smiles at that. A slow smile with dimples. A victory smile.

“Don’t go declaring victory yet, I’m not sure that I’ve forgiven you, there is a lot of trust you’d have to rebuild there.”

“Ok, give me index cards,” he says eagerly. I wince.

“No. This isn’t an index cards kind of thing, this has to be born out of a sincere desire to want me to be someone important in your life Josh. Not a desire to simply assuage your guilt over how you spoke to me at a critical time in our lives. Or because you want me to be a good assistant and fetch you coffee. I walked out of your life once and I can do it again.”

His eyes widen and he stops digging in his suitcase and sinks on to the bed next to me.

“I wasn’t kidding last night. I’m done being Donna Doormat, Josh. I’m done with the narrative that I’m the uneducated blonde you saved from a bad relationship when you hired me. Frankly you treated me way worse than he ever did anyway. I want a real relationship. A relationship where I come first and my needs are equally important. I don’t…I don’t know that you have proved you can give that to me, even as a friend, much less as a romantic partner. Our relationship failed because it can’t be you trying to save the world and me devoted to the care and feeding of Joshua Lyman. It can’t work that way.”

I watch Josh as he takes a breath and swallows slowly. He looks like I just kicked his puppy. I reach over and grab his hand and we sit quietly for a few moments.

“You know how you wanted to be a ballerina when you were little…because you liked the word?” I say softly as I stare at our entwined fingers. I don’t know why I feel compelled to tell him this, but it feels liberating to share something that had been only precious to me and now might be precious to someone else.

“Yeah thanks for telling the President about that by the way,” he scoffs.

“Yeah, pretty sure that was Sam actually. Anyway, so something you don’t know about me, I actually was one…a ballerina. All throughout middle school and high school. You know I dropped out of University of Wisconsin because that’s where I ended up going to college, but you don’t know that I’d actually applied to Julliard. I got accepted too. I couldn’t go because I didn’t have the money and I wasn’t quite good enough to qualify for any scholarships. When we got together, at the beginning -- before I understood where our relationship was going -- I always imagined that we would have kids and one of them would be a girl. I used to daydream that she could be the ballerina I wanted to be and could go to Julliard.”

“You actually thought about us having kids?”

“Yes,” I answer simply. “I’ve wanted to be a mother as long as I can remember.” I watch as he lifts our joined hands up and then lets them fall down slowly where they hit the rumpled bedspread. “Could you imagine us as parents?” I ask quietly.

“It would have been pretty hard to be a good dad and run the country,” he says. “Or be good parents and run a national campaign for a wild card presidential candidate.”

“I don’t know, the Congressman has kids,” I say.

“He’s also got a lot of help and isn’t actually running his own campaign, much as he would like to believe he is,” Josh scoffs.

I look at the clock and note that it’s almost 6. We have a staff meeting at 7:30.

“I, uh, I have to go now.”

He nods in response but doesn’t move to release my hand. “I want to give you what you want, but I don’t know how.”

I squeeze his hand and pull mine away. I move to the door and prepare to leave. I pause before I open the door and look back at him.

“If it’s really important to you, you’ll find a way,” I say. “Start small.”

He doesn’t respond but I know he heard me. “See you in a little bit,” I say as I slip through the open the door.

“Yeah, ok.”

I close the door quietly and as I turn around into the hallway I am nearly bowled over by the intern from yesterday. She’s all packed up with her suitcase and handbag. She smiles at me.

“Jason already called me and apologized for what he said. I don’t know if we’re going to work it out, but he’s going to pick me up from the airport and we’re going to talk. I really appreciate you helping me calm down yesterday. I really do think it’s going to be ok now.”

I smile and give her a little hug. “Just a word of advice, make sure he treats you right and loves you as much as you love him.”

I watch her walk away with a pang of jealousy. Someday I may get my turn again, but until then the heat of presidential politics will have to keep me warm at night.

**Author's Note:**

> Lately I've been into the angst and part of me wondered what would happen if Josh wasn't so supportive of an unintended pregnancy. In all the baby fic I have ever read the closest he gets to upset is freaked out and then he comes around quickly. So this is the first of several unrelated fics that I have sketched out that have Josh as an unwilling father. The others aren't finished (who knows if they will ever be). Even this work feels incomplete to me, I think there's a final chapter that I just can't quite put my finger on yet. If you have suggestions for how you'd like to see this end, drop it in the comments. Maybe I will have inspiration to add on to this at some point in the future.


End file.
